Daily Reviews Summary 12/11/07

The registry is one of the most important parts of Windows. Inside it we find settings that make both Windows and other programs tick. Anyone who has delved into it knows it is a dark and scary place and one you usually try to stay out of unless you really need to change one of those settings Microsoft would wish you did not try to change. Over time the registry, just like Windows in general, has a tendency to fill up with unneeded content, many times left by uninstalled programs that do not know it is not polite to leave stuff behind. Registry cleaning programs have been around as long as the registry has existed. A quick search for “Registry” and “Clean” over at Tucows.com results in several hundreds of results so it is obvious that this is a lucrative niche.

Today I am testing the program RegistryBooster 2 from Uniblue, a program that promises to clean, repair and optimize the registry for you.

Leveraging on their success with the CM690, CoolerMaster introduces a new chassis aimed at enthusiasts who expect nothing less than the extraordinary. Stepping up to the plate is the CoolerMaster Cosmos which makes its entrance into an already burgeoning enclosure industry. It is an industry where manufacturers strive to separate themselves from the next by offering new features and unique innovations to entice the unwary enthusiast into a purchase. With the introduction of the Cosmos, CoolerMaster hopes to redefine what it means to own an enthusiast level enclosure.

We have managed to obtain a retail NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card. In fact, we are putting it to the test right now!

A full-fledged comparison will take quite sometime to complete, so in the meantime, here is a quick comparison between the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the GeForce 8800 GT in four DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games.

WOLFKING TROOPER Laser Gaming Mouse ReviewOCC has published a new review of the WOLFKING TROOPER Laser Gaming Mouse

The next significant feature is the rate of fire selector. This allows you to discharge one to four rounds with each click on the trigger button. This can give you a really big advantage in a situation where timing is everything. There are three selections for this setting. For one shot the scroll wheel is not lit up, for two shots the wheel glows red, for three shots the wheel glows blue and for four shots, the wheel mixes the red and blue to make purple, but as you can see, the blue LED outshines the red, so it looks more blue-ish (last picture).

Sapphire HD 3870 Review OverclockedOCC has published a new review of the Sapphire HD 3870

The most that I could get out of this card was the core clock at 850MHz from the stock 777MHz and the memory at almost 1300 from the stock 1126. I re-ran all of the benchmarks with the overclocked settings. The overclocking took place with the newest drivers installed. The overclocked results are denoted by "Overclocked" in the graphs.

Nexus is known for their silent 120mm fans, today we have their latest product in for test, an ATX case build for silence, with 2x120mm fans and foam padding it aims to keep the noise down, but can it keep a high end system cool at the same time?

This machine is the first of its type to include an AGEIA PhysX processor along with its pair of GeForce 8700 GTs running in SLI mode, multiple hard drives, and top notch LCD. We have plenty of information regarding the slick WoW edition of this notbook as well, in addition to some exclusive pics of the 'Figureprints' available to owners of the golden ticket. Head on over to the site and take a look...

The Scythe Ninja Mini SCMNJ-1000 is a compact lower-noise heatsink ideally suited to compact PC chassis. These diminutive PCs have until now not had much in the way to choose from for reduced noise CPU cooling. The Ninja Mini itself looks like a cube, and comes with a small 80mm fan that operates relatively quietly. Among the flurry of 120mm fan packing low noise heatsinks being released, the Scythe Ninja Mini stands just 110mm tall.

The Glacialtech Igloo 5610 Silent heatsink is identical the Igloo 5610 PWM model in all ways, except that the two coolers use different fans. The Igloo 5610 Silent that Frostytech is testing in this review has a nice and quiet fixed-speed fan, the previous model a louder PWM fan. Both heatsinks are compact LGA775 compatible CPU coolers and suitable for office PCs.

Antec has really done it with this case. This is the first case in a long time that I really enjoyed using. I'm actually thinking of using it permanently. The case is very silent, it eats vibrations for breakfast because there are none that I can hear. The front door keeps the ugly drives away from sight and its lockable too. The sidepanel is easy accessible and the room inside is just sufficient enough but could be a tad bigger. The included powersupply is silent yet powerful enough to keep the juice flowing to your hardware. In the end, this is a very nice case with excellent built quality.

HP's Media Center Pavilion PCs are usually one of the top performing PCs on the market, so TechReviewSource.com's editors took a look at one of HP's latest, the HP Pavilion Elite m9040n. It's loaded with multimedia features along with great performance. Read their full review for all the details.

Ive reviewed a number of watercooling kits and blocks and handled even more, but this would be the first time to review / install a full watercooling set, with all from the same brand. When we were contacted by Gigabyte to review one of their kits I was thinking "Oh, hell here comes another bogged-up low-quality kit", but these thoughts turned out to be premature.

It is a basic copper watercooling block with loads of pins to increase the effective cooling surface. The top again is made of a kind of hard plastic, and again with solid hard plastic fittings running side to side, now again the same remark about the block as I did for the pump, it has no loose fittings, which seems more prone to snapping and cracking when using other clamps than the ones provided.

Rugged thumb drives are nothing new, but they are from the folks at OCZ. They recently released their ATV and ATV Turbo drives, ranging from 2GB - 16GB, and have huge promises strapped to them. We put one of each through a battery of "real-world" tests as well as our normal performance testing.

With the recent release of the Rosewill RX81 series hard drive enclosures Rosewill was nice enough to supply us with the RX81-CW-US for this review. This hot-swappable enclosure is one of the first that I've seen to be both external and be equipped just for a single hard drive. This slim enclosure certainly is a handy enclosure with its screw-less, quick and easy installation. The RX81-CW-US supports both USB and eSATA connections and don't worry it does come with an eSATA bracket for those of us who aren't lucky enough to have an eSATA port on their case or motherboard.

XTracPads Pro Mousepad and Mad Dotz ReviewOCIA.net has posted their review of the XTracPads Pro Mousepad and Mad Dotz.

While doing some online shopping recently I decided to look into how I might possibly improve my mousing experience, and the Pro Mousepad and Mad Dotz from XTracPads caught my eye. To be honest, the Mad Dotz were the only aftermarket stick-on mouse feet/pads I saw at this particular site, and the Pro was the cheapest gaming mousepad that didn't have pictures of dogs or WoW characters printed on it.

I just finished taking the latest version of Puppy Linux for a spin and was planning on doing a review. However, considering this was on my notebook, that meant connecting to the Internet, preferably via wireless.

Now this is the part that excites me. I love being able to see how far you can push a piece of hardware past its rated limits. However, this is also where I was disapointed. No matter how hard I tried - and I tried for hours - I could not get this memory to go beyond 1200MHz. I upped the voltage to the breaking point of safe limits, I loosened up the timings to see if it would be stable ... but no matter what I did, the memory would not pass memtest86+ for me to even try to boot into Windows without hosing my system. I was expecting even a little overclock, but nothing, not even 5MHz. I would expect for being an "Extreme" set of RAM that it would be able to overclock easy, but this was not the case.